Page 12 - Begrave Thesis_Neat

nationalist movement, declared in its obituary of Belgrave in reference to the last

years of his tenure:

History will tell whether the source of the decisions, judgments, and
policies he implemented was himself and his diligence or were
dictated to him from above or in line with the local situation prevalent
6
during his tenure.

Thus this thesis comes to address the political struggle between Belgrave

who acted as the head figure of the Bahraini Administration on behalf of the

Ruler and the nationalist movement of that era. This has required access to a

wide range of primary sources.

Initial research was conducted on the Records of Bahrain: Primary Documents

1820-1960. The records included republished correspondences, reports, and letters

vis-à-vis Bahrain from the India Office Records (IOR) and the Foreign Office (FO).

Other similar republished volumes of documents were inspected such as the Ruling

Families of Arabia: Bahrain: the Ruling Family of Al-Khalifah and Arab Gulf Cities:

Manama. The volumes were either divided chronologically or by topic. These were

used to identify relevant papers, names, and files during the process of research as

they only included a selected number of documents. The next stage explored

documents at The National Archives (TNA) at Kew, Richmond. The research method

was based on exploring Bahrain’s local events and also aimed at viewing the greater

picture of developments regionally and globally. The research included, inter alia,

names of personalities in relation to the thesis, location, departments, time period,

British policy in Bahrain and the Middle East, and archives of the British Residency

and Political Agency in the Gulf. Furthermore the documents explored at TNA

6 ‘Wafat Al-Sir Charles Belgrave’ [The Death of Sir Charles Belgrave], Al-Adwha’a, 6 March 1969, 3.

© Hamad E. Abdulla viii